His mother being native to Berks County, Stevens (1879-1955) entered the flowering heart as a child from Reading when he was born. I came in from Germantown. His temperament derives from farm visits, biblical pietism and a love of nature. That this would stem from centuries of worship and inwendigeit transmitted in the gifts of his birth is as inevitable as Stevens himself, a mature voice to be compared with Henry James, not with the boyish outcries of the younger. Why he was never even a professor! He held a real job, that sets him apart right there, refused to be the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Raised at his mother's side, Stevens was subsequently owned by the Poetry establishment and New York before he returned to the well of his life in The Necessary Angel and Transport to Summer. Those who previously owned him would not let go however, so his baptism at the end of life was contested, denied and ignored. The sophistication and mere naturalism of the early work did not last. In the 1940's he re-investigated his origins and his last books, especially Auroras of Autumn revive the ancestral. As maybe the only mature American poet he is also the philosophical and these last poems show he never surrendered the early beliefs. Thanks to elimae his celebration in the long line of major poets baptized in the Spirit once took a reading here.
Poetic Repair: My Tongue a Lute, My Heart a Lyre
Along with being conflicted about their identity, baptism is the essence of controversy for the Pennsylvania Dutch. As Germans in an English land, aliens and foreigners, from Ben Franklin on they were ridiculed for their convoluted life and speech. That the most urbane poet America produced was Pennsylvania Dutch is extreme payback. Stevens was an underwriter, an insurance executive for Hartford, but laid testament to Pennsylvania in his poems. In the last weeks of his life he was baptized, in utter contradiction of his reputation.
Stevens' Baptism
"The future must bear within it every past, not least the parts that have become submerged in the subconscious" (Stevens. Letters, 373).
To view the beginning from the end everything must be rewritten. How else understand his lament of the past in "The Bed of Old John Zeller," that his grandfather held beliefs he could not believe. He wanted to believe, would reason allow it, but then he did believe. The last gasp of the poet swallowed in death was baptized by a priest in the hospital. This priest was so afraid of Stevens' legacy he hardly dared mention the event, didn't tell Holly, Stevens' daughter, or the wife. Nobody told Harriet Monroe of Poetry and those who run the Stevens' reputation, mostly women. That savage presence of the death bed lay among all the old beliefs of Dutchmen dead and living in the poetic recall of Pennsylvania (see Lombardi, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone, 145).
Why doesn't Stevens say what he means? Too simple, but not too elemental when he wants to feel the gold vermilion of a girl. We do not talk poetry or theology or put truth plainly to the man Stevens thinks he's not in his harmonies of the flesh and zeitgeist of spirit. He convinced himself, Stevens did, but couldn't quite swallow his own supremacy at the bed of old John Zeller. That was saved for later.
Swallowing his own supremecy, resurrection was present everywhere in Stevens' revived childhood catechism of his grandfather. Three weeks before death in one fell swoop he contradicted all the Ideas of Order he conjured up. Some mage who ran away from his mother's Bible and Zeller's bed to fame, the lilies of the field caught him, the cannas, orchids, the iris said they should be glad to take water with him in the fount. Baptism is funny that way, it changes everything. It changes the mind.
The act of prophecy in this John [the Baptist] Zeller is that the promises of God are good to a thousand generations of those who love Him. So Stevens comes down to the cleansing fount, plunges in the grace of God. What a wonder, baptized and buried, the waters creased his head. Drops on the brow from a living hand, the room gave a sigh, transported to the other side. Not that baptism is a magical event. He was made new by the word he spoke. God capitalized on it, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. How that afrights the man who thought him comfortably stopped in logical positivism.
Stevens Decks Hemingway
Stevens, told of Hemingway's brutality to woman, exited a tavern to confront Hemingway in the street. Stevens knocked Hemingway to the ground in Key West, punched him in the head. Hemingway later died of a shotgun blast to that same head. He couldn't stand the loss of himself parceled out by the millions, Life's version of the Old Man (and the Sea) ravening, ravening readers were his gods. They read Hemingway raw, but Stevens in his bed after the fight and before his death winced at his own naivete. To think he could undo in a splash what he had built meticulous to house reason against the savage! Boxers should be poets but not novelists.
What is the meaning of the sign, the outward sign?
What is the meaning of the sign, the outward sign?
Stevens loved his flowers. We are all botanicals that "water" puts back into the human mind again, to take Mr. Yeats at the best. Not simples, perennials from the root. Cataloged in his letters and poems, a materia medica of the flower came to Stevens, "I know the end, cracked the code that all creation travails for the adoption of sons." Only Stevens could hear this. In baptism our lives pass before us, the flesh, the youth, the marriage with a wife, children, to be returned to life and seek the gold skin and eyes, the silk. Baptism brings life that buys the redeemer, baptizer, deliverer, lover, friend, back to basics of the coffin. Who comes to rescue the quick and the dead?
This coat of many colors Stevens' own poems. It was his piety and it took critics time to decide if they would throw out the old as unworth the new, or see in it the human nurture at his mother's breast and his grandfathers' life and all the lives he meant to live. "Try on this coat," they said to Stevens. His works swirled in the genetic coat, covered in the blood of the righteous. Throw it out or start afresh? "Neither," the angel said, "see in his verse his resurrection," which being interpreted means that Stevens underwrote in image and thought the surrender he at last made. He pretended, but a deeper being got him yet. Those architectured subtexts flee, but he is there. Whither shall I flee from his presence? His hair grew long in the hymn of being to comfort Stevens. Baptism accreted unlayering. Stevens wrote long mysteries below the surface.
Old Man Zeller's Bed
Critic Lombardi says Stevens' "contemporary world reduces God to something powerless or irrelevant" (143), that the world of belief, "Zeller's world has forsaken the world of reality, but in the contemporary world people live their lives as though God does not exist" (Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone,142). So, "Wallace refuses to capitalize the initial letter of "god" as an admission that the poet acknowledges neither the existence nor the eternal nature of a Supreme Being." But Stevens showed them up.
If anything, the Bed of Old John Zeller says that Stevens' own disorder is as great as his heritage of the Pennsylvania past, but at least it is a "structure of ideas" as opposed to the "structure of things." Whatever he means by disorder we can see it is a compound of the religious misalliances of the Pennsylvania Dutch past, with all the confused doctrines it produced. If this were too general a misunderstanding then say that "structure" refers simply to the Creed of the faith in general. Stevens says, "add your own disorder to disaster," sounding like he's not of the modern camp either.
In stoic sadness neither past nor present are true to him. The structure of things and ideas in the "old peak of night" is his heritage. But how important is that? "It is easy to wish for another structure," but to get only the weak substitute, the "ghostly sequences" of humanism is not enough. Here the underwriter speaks. This is "the habit of wishing as if one's grandfather lay in one's heart." Wishing is such a great truth next to the "structures." Yet his grandfather does sleep in his heart and he knows it, so to escape he says the opposite of what he knows. Witness his baptism. "Evade" wishing, "accept" structure, both unwished for, yet wished. "Oh to be a solipsist" he might have titled it. But a critic won't get the way of the poet or of a faith that backs a horse into the stable forwards, what Arndt said of faith.
Stevens' "Dead Ancestors"
"The future must bear within it every past, not least the parts that have become submerged in the subconscious" (Letters, 373). Critics share one trait with poets, exaggeration to prove a point. Lombardi makes out that Stevens' dead ancestors, like living progeny (aren't the two one?) explain Stevens' struggle to remember his ancestral origins" (125). This struggle comes down to corresponding with some "country pastors" and exchanging letters with his sister about their mother. But his past of the hills, the flowers, farm and sky included with his mother's Bible, are more present than his past in poetry. They are always there in his concerns about life in the ancestral bed and their life in his heart. Stevens "struggle" of ancestry was a joy. His greatest ancestry is in the natural, far from Hartford and Harriet. This ancestry was in his blood. Isn't that a pun? I mean his family environment, his growing up, the farm and more the continual love of the botanical he always carried with him, visiting botanical gardens, corresponding about flowers with his wife, cultivating his garden at home. The dead ancestors are not dead. They live in him and make him himself. That's what comes of a godly heritage. Even if you don't believe it it's true. So the perennial love of the PA Dutch for nature permeated Stevens' being and was communicated there by his mother and her family.
Lombardi says, "he and his genealogists labored to reorganize the fragments of his past into an acceptable [he should have said coherent] whole.... At a time when the past seemed most elusive, Stevens sought to reconstruct it for the purposes of establishing continuity between the generations. Transport to Summer depicts the story of that reconstruction" (125). But poems aren't tracts. There is an approach/avoidance in Stevens as in many Pennsylvania Dutch. The notion that he sought to form an "acceptable" past is telling. The self recriminations of the Dutch are woven into their identity, like Richard E. Wentz saying he doesn't believe in heaven. Lombardi found that the Dutch Reformed Church in Feasterville in 1751 had an early pastor, Jonathan Dubois, who was Stevens' ancestor: "the yard contains the graves John Stevens, his great grandparent, who was 76 at his death in 1811, and Sarah Stoopthoof Stevens, who was 81 at her death in 1825" (127-8). Given time to sink in, which happens with age, there Stevens appears among a cloud of witnesses.
Baptism
Lombardi goes overboard talking of the baptism, as if Stevens had a wish to be a Dante or St. Augustine. "Had he arrived at his own vision of Reading and mistaken it for Jerusalem or found Jerusalem and mistaken it for Reading" (246), a pun on Oedipus, whether going or coming from Athens or Thebes. But Stevens' visions are of the words themselves, not the places, they are of the flowers not the gardens. It is a *cruci-fiction that "commencing in 1915 Stevens, about to begin his quest for Reading-Jerusalem, devised in poetry a dialectic between the Christian world of the Pennsylvania past, represented by the Zellers and the Stevenses, and the non-Christian or post-Christian world of Stevens' present, represented by the secular vision he had cultivated in college" (246). The two parts are too neat. Stevens is more like the topography of a cinnamon bun. Lombardi says, "Stevens made a reality of that landscape of Pennsylvania. In short, he became Pennsylvania, a phenomenon more genuine than unique" (248). But he doesn't become Pennsylvania, it is more than that.
More discussion here and here and here
It's hard to find the great writers in English unbaptized, a prophecy itself. Up close that night I took down Necessary Angel and sat hours denoting the glory of God in Stevens' mind-making. Stevens' baptism consecrates post hoc. Then I took Transport to Summer out, fallow from decades, an angel from a dollar sale. Transport had Max and Edna Lerner's name in the front. To prefer the old duped man calls down rocks upon the head. But there is also malleable rock in the aquifer rising up. Its dust cries with Stevens.
Cross the road! We bring this Pennsylvanian to mind with other baptisms Pennsylvanians know, I mean of farmers, laborers, shopkeepers, mothers, daughters, sons under the arbors of the harmless east, you know the kind. In night we take him down. And all this from his birth!
More Stevens. Put Religion back in poetry!
They used to tell me when I performed Keats, Byron and Shelley that the Romantics make poetry their religion. The point being, why? As a substitute for religion it implies some inner need, yes? In Necessary Angel Stevens says the poet in formation and realization is parallel to the mystic. Indeed he uses religious terms in the steps of this process:
"If, then, when we speak of liberation, we mean an exodus; if when we speak of justification, we mean a kind of justice of which we had not known and on which we had not counted; if when we experience a sense of purification, we can think of the establishing of a self, it is certain that the experience of the poet is of no less a degree then the experience of the mystic and we may be certain that in the case of poets, the peers of saints, those experiences are of no less a degree than the experiences of the saints themselves" (Necessary Angel, 50-51, italics mine).
Stevens has a way of grasping and letting go his questions of eternity at the same time. While he seems to distance himself from any aspect of being a true believer, acting the poet sophisticate who knows and will tell, the Olympiad above manner, this is more defense than sincere, for underneath he is just that sincere about his Bible lessons as a child and his mother's devotion as when he translates high sounding phrases.
The Bird That Sings
So he continues directly:
"In this state of elevation we feel perfectly adapted to the idea that moves and l'oiseau que chante (the bird that sings)... It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction; and, on the other hand, if we say the idea of God is merely poetic, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free--if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial, robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation" (Angel, 51).
This is either blasphemy of a kind, putting the poet as creator in place of the Creator, or a praise to the creator (Sayers, The Mind of the Maker or Tolkien, sub-creation) where the hymns of joy to the creation by the poet are sung by himself. All of this is from his insecurity to declare himself a true believer. One feels the social pressure of his position in Poetry mightily. As if he were pretending the afflatus, another term he liked, were something to be had from drugs, or good conversation, or even fine music or art, instead of what it is, a pearl of great price. Why not use Biblical metaphors, he does it all the time, as italics above again show. There is some sense here that he says poetry is the maker of God and poetry is a substitute for God, but another in which the poet is a mimic of God as much as that bird that sings.
Of course we have elsewhere contended that the bird that sings is the joy of creation, the joy of the Lord, as opposed to Ambigen and those who say that animal expression is the cry of pain, of dissonance, that it, to take Stevens and turn his rhetoric on its head, is to make sacred his profane lunacy here. Take a look here at Chimeric Splicing. And be whole.
Note:
Stevens was baptized April 1955 by the chaplain of St. Francis
Hospital. Taped interviews with Father
Hanley are now part of the Huntington Library collection." After a brief release
from the hospital, he was readmitted and died August 2, 1955, at the age of 75.
17. Despite the peace that Stevens found in the weeks before
his death, his conversion made everyone around him nervous, even the clergy.
Stevens asked Father Hanley, Sister Bernetta Quinn, and others who knew about
his conversion to keep the matter from his family. He was afraid that his wife
would come to the hospital and become hysterical. This reflected class
prejudices. Converting to Catholicism for a Hartford patrician was like becoming
"honorary" shanty Irish. That was simply not done. It could get you
thrown out of the country club. Father Hanley's bishop also wanted the matter
to be kept quiet because he didn't want the Protestant population of Hartford fearing that they
would be pestered by priests when they came to St. Francis. The hospital had a
non-proselytizing image to maintain.
Later, when Stevens's daughter learned of Father Hanley's
claim, she flatly denied it could have happened. While this flew utterly in the
face of the facts as attested to not only by Father Hanley but also by others
who attended Stevens's baptism, Holly Stevens's denial of her father's
conversion dissuaded many scholars from taking it seriously or discussing it at
any length. Although Holly sold her father's papers to Pasadena's Huntington Library in the 1970s,
she still controlled their use until her death in 1992. She gave scholars the
impression that they would have limited access to quote from Stevens's papers
if they paid too much attention to his conversion. For this reason, it seems,
Peter Brazeau, who wrote an oral biography of Stevens and interviewed Father
Hanley at length, used only a small portion of the material he developed on
Stevens's conversion.
